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It’s a scorching 102 degrees in Las Vegas, but Giada De Laurentiis is freezing. With the AC inside her sleek new restaurant, Giada, on full blast on a recent Friday afternoon, the celebrity chef decides to change out of the stylish black chef’s coat created by her fashion designer husband, Todd Thompson, and into a sweatshirt—right in the middle of the eatery, even though it’s bustling with staff preparing for dinner guests. “Could you stand in front of me?” De Laurentiis asks an assistant and this reporter, in an attempt to be more discreet.

Who has time to seek out someplace more private? Not this culinary-world star, whose career is firing on all burners. Besides hosting a hit Food Network show, Giada at Home, the Italian-American chef, 43, is a mentor on Food Network Star and a contributor to NBC’s Today. Her growing empire also includes seven best-selling cookbooks, a series of food-themed children’s books, a spokesmodel gig for Clairol hair color, and, as of June 3, her namesake restaurant.

"I had to fight for a lot," De Laurentiis says of getting her first restaurant right. "It made me tougher." (Photo by Melissa Golden for Parade; Grooming: Julie Morgan; Sam Saboura for Rouge Artists; Chef Coat: Giada Veags; Photographed at Giada at The Cromwell, Las Vegas)

Located on the second floor of the Cromwell hotel in the heart of the Vegas Strip, Giada—which serves up Italian cuisine with fresh California influences, including the chef’s signature Lemon Spaghetti With Shrimp—seats 260 and has views of the Bellagio fountains and Nevada mountains. It’s hard to imagine a more high-profile location for her first eatery, but De Laurentiis likes high stakes. It’s in her genes. “I don’t do anything small,” declares the granddaughter of the late, ­legendary movie producer Dino De Laurentiis (Serpico, King Kong). “I’m like my grandfather—go big or go home!”

Giada takes you on a tour of her new restaurant in this exclusive video:

While grand in scale and ambition, Giada feels intimate, thanks to its soothing earth tones and personal touches, like the chandeliers inscribed with the chef’s stay-slim food philosophy (“I eat a little bit of everything and not a lot of anything”) and an antipasti bar and pizza oven that recall those in DDL Foodshow, her grandfather’s ’80s-era food market–restaurant in Beverly Hills. That’s where a preteen De Laurentiis could often be found hanging out after school. “It’s where I realized that I wanted to be a chef,” she recalls, settling onto a leather banquette and digging into a green salad. “I didn’t know if I could make money at it, but I loved it enough to try.”

Thanks to good reviews—and the chef’s frequent presence in the dining room, where she can be found chatting up patrons—Giada’s early business has been brisk. So there’s something especially refreshing about hearing De Laurentiis, who lives in Los Angeles with her husband and daughter Jade, 6, admit that the yearlong process of transforming the space from a two-story parking garage into a Sin City hot spot wasn’t all la dolce vita. “I spent a lot of time working when I probably should’ve been doing things with my family,” she says. “There were many times I thought, ‘I just don’t want to put us through this.’ ”

That sacrifice is why De Laurentiis—one of a precious few women who have their own restaurant on the Strip—isn’t afraid to own her high standards. “Throughout my life I’ve been a people pleaser, and I can’t do that with this job,” she says. “I expect perfection from everybody who works in this restaurant. If you don’t give me perfection, this is probably not the right place for you.” Her friend and fellow chef Bobby Flay agrees. “You’re going to ruffle some feathers; I do it all the time,” he says. “I told her the most important thing was that she’s happy with her restaurant.”

“In the beginning, a lot of people here were like, ‘She’s such a —–,’ ” De Laurentiis adds. “Actually, I’m not. I just deserve the answers and respect any man would get.” Take the large retractable windows at Giada: “It’s hard to get the air conditioning right,” De Laurentiis says, “and everybody tells me, ‘Well, we’ll just keep them closed.’ And I’m like, ‘No. What makes this room special is that the windows open.’ I fight for every teeny detail.”

After all, she’s got a family legacy to protect. “My grandfather worked hard for a name that’s known around the world,” she says. “When I got my first show on Food Network, he told me, ‘Make sure you don’t trash our name or bring it down.’ It goes beyond just me as a person.”

Born in Rome, De Laurentiis was a shy child who never expected to lead a life in the spotlight—especially one so associated with her Italian roots. Arriving in L.A. at age 7, she didn’t speak a lick of English and found ­assimilation tough. “I had a different name,” she says. “I brought spaghetti Bolognese and Nutella sandwiches for school lunch. People ridiculed me for it, so I spent a lot of time alone or eating with teachers.”

The experience, she admits, “made me not really want to be Italian. My parents would come pick us up from school and start speaking the language, and I would be embarrassed. I did not want to be different.”“She became totally American,” says her aunt Raffy, who has appeared on De Laurentiis’s shows. “I had to bug her to learn Italian again when she started her career, because she couldn’t cook Italian and not speak it—or speak it wrong, which is even worse.”

What the young De Laurentiis craved more than anything was to make her own way. “I watched many women in my family not have a lot of independence,” says the chef, whose mother, Veronica, gave up an acting career to raise four children. Aunt Raffy, a Hollywood producer, was a notable exception. “She made a real career for herself and that was very alluring. I thought, ‘That’s the kind of woman I want to be.’ ”

Toughing it out as a chef in training at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris. (Courtesy of Giada De Laurentiis)

While her grandfather believed professional kitchens were the domain of “strong men with muscle,” the petite, 5-foot-2 De Laurentiis stood firm in her decision to be a chef, and after graduating with an anthropology degree from UCLA, she studied at the prestigious Le Cordon Bleu in Paris. But she became discouraged by the instructors there (“When you make mistakes, they’re abusive”) and begged her mother to let her return home. “I was so desperately lonely,” she says.

But Mom, who regretted giving up on her own professional dreams, responded with tough love. “She said, ‘If you come home, we will not support you. You’re cut off,’ ” recalls De Laurentiis. “I hated her for it for a while, because I didn’t have any money. But I stuck it out.”

The move paid off: After completing her training, De Laurentiis returned to L.A. and landed a job at Wolfgang Puck’s Spago restaurant before starting her own catering company and working as a personal chef for Hollywood types like actor-turned-director Ron Howard. But it was her side gig as a food stylist that provided her big break. After a 2002 Food & Wine story documenting a De Laurentiis family dinner party featured her work—and images of the camera-ready chef—the Food Network came calling. “The person in charge of pro­gramming called me into her office and asked me to look at something,” recalls Flay. “She put in a tape, and it was Giada. I said, ‘This girl is going to be a star.’ ”

Not that adjusting to life as host of her first show, Everyday Italian, was easy. “I was terrible,” De Laurentiis insists, “and so unhappy.” It didn’t help that she felt viewers weren’t taking her seriously. “My looks were a big part of it,” she says. “When you don’t fit the image people have [of a chef], it’s difficult to break that wall down.”

She believes she ultimately succeeded “partly because I don’t take myself too seriously, and partly because I am passionate about what I do. I try not to bang people over the head with information but make cooking fun to learn.”

With her family, husband Todd Thompson and daughter Jade. (Courtesy of Giada De Laurentiis)

Another key to her success: husband Todd, whom De Laurentiis met when she was just 19 and he was almost 27. “We dated for 13 and a half years before we got married,” she says. “I went to culinary school and did many things. He was constantly saying, ‘You need to find who you are on your own. I am not your identity.’ ” She laughs. “Today he’d probably say, ‘That was such a mistake!’ Because now I’m like, ‘I’m going to do this and that,’ and he’s like, ‘What about me?’ The roles have reversed.”

De Laurentiis is candid about the effect a high-profile career can have on a relationship. “I’m not sure anyone ­[other than Todd] could deal with it,” she says. “It’s not that I’m hard to be around, but this is not an easy life. Men say they like [a successful woman], but in reality they don’t. There are times where they’re very uncomfortable.”

As for her sexy image, “he thinks it’s fantastic,” she says, though “sometimes he’d probably like to just lock me up and not have anybody see or touch me! But he’s very secure and deals with it well.”

De Laurentiis tries to keep her personal and work lives separate. “When I go home, I put away that person who’s in control and demanding and let [my husband] be in control. I cook for him and my daughter, and I’m a wife in that more traditional role.”

While she’s aware those comments may not sit well with many modern women, she’s not about to apologize for them. “I’m not saying this is the way everyone should do it,” she says. “I like to have a family. I don’t want to grow old by myself, and I don’t want to be a single mom.”

For much of her life, De Laurentiis says, “I didn’t plan on having children. Jade was such a surprise.” It’s one of the reasons she hasn’t opened a restaurant before now. “I wanted to see how much time and energy it would take to have a career and be a mom. I wasn’t going to add new projects. Then I realized she would be starting school soon, and my profile had been raised, and I was ready.” She chose Vegas rather than L.A. so she wouldn’t have “the pressure of being home and feeling like I needed to be at the restaurant. When I’m in Vegas, I’ve got nothing else I need to do. I come here for the day or a week and go back home.” Her mother and sister help care for Jade when De Laurentiis is working, and though time away from her daughter “rips my heart out,” the chef believes that “if the parents are happy, the child inevitably will be. It’s not quantity, it’s quality.”

With her restaurant up and running, De Laurentiis is looking forward to more quality time with Jade, who’s already expressed an interest in cooking: “Right now she’s all about anything in cupcake form.” The chef is also thinking ahead to her next career move, which just may involve following in her grandfather’s footsteps and producing a film. “If you’d asked me two years ago, I would’ve said, ‘Absolutely not!’ But it’s all come full circle, and there’s something beautiful about that.”

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without the prior, express, and written permission of Athlon Media Group.
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